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A week into my Clean Eating Challenge and I’ve learnt a lot, and also failed in a few places too! I’ve been pretty careful with what I eat (on and off a little, but mostly on) for the last few years anyway, but I’m taking it to a new level as a personal experiment to see what difference it might make.

Hayley at CEC (Clean Eating Challenge) has just been round for our 2nd get together to discuss diet and exercise, and we reviewed what I’ve been eating throughout the week and what exercise I’ve done.

To summarise, the exercise I’ve done this week is:

Monday: Strength session at H3 Performance (the gym I’m a member of, fantastic community and great staff, can’t recommend this place enough)

In terms of diet, I’m struggling to keep my fat percentage down relative to my protein. It seems most of the proteins I’ve been eating are also high in fat; eggs, mince, sausages, bacon. The start of next week unfortunately won’t be hugely better, as I’ve already purchased a lot of meat for next week.

My macros have been worked out as the following, which should allow for some fat loss whilst still allowing for performance:

Carbohydrate 165g

Protein 140g

Fat 60g

This means that for every 2.3 grams of protein I eat, I am only allowed 1 gram of fat. I’m going to call this a PF ratio. For example something with 4g of protein and 1g of fat would have a 4 PF ratio. I’m less bothered about carbs, I can easily add those with sweet potato or other root veg.

There are some simple changes I am going to make.

Pre-cooking chicken. Lean chicken breast meat is high in protein vs fat. The exact numbers vary from place to place, however one place suggests a 86g portion (half a breast) contains 27.6g of protein and only 3.1g of fat. That’s a 8.9 PF ratio.

Smoothies with protein powder. I’ve ordered some some from Natural Nutrients which is from grass fed cows and isn’t full of other junk (and a 93 PF ratio!!)

Tuna. Salmon appears to be quite fatty, and tuna seems to be a very good balance (100g of tuna is 30g protein and 6g fat. A 6 PF ratio.

A lot Less greek yogurt – it has a 0.7 PF ratio!

Less cottage cheese – a 1.66 PF ratio.

Lean mince should be ok, it has a 4.2 PF ratio.

Here’s the graph from apple’s healthkit of my weight and fat percentage. The fat percentage is rather fictitious, it’s measured by my scales. It’s nothing like my true percentage (10.17% measured by CEC) but it’s a metric, and I like data so I’m tracking it! The graphs start pretty much on new years day, which is when I started to recover from the Christmas drinking, and over eating sessions.

I’ve not done wonderfully well against my goals, below is a graph showing the percentage by which I missed my goal. For example, if I missed by +50%, I’d have eaten 50% more of something than I should have done.

4 thoughts on “Clean Eating Challenge – End of Week 1”

I wouldn’t worry too much about the fat in eggs, fish and meat. It’s the fat that comes with the sugar that’s bad. People think fat is bad but it’s actually really important for making you feel satisfied. As long as you’re avoiding the fat that’s in cakes, chocolate etc you can eat as much as the good fats as you like. Avocados are really high in fat but it’s really healthy fat, as with salmon and other oily fish.

My understanding is that fat is no longer the ‘bad guy’ and refined carbohydrates are. [Sources: too tired to look up the studies, as I forgot to bookmark them]. What are the “macros” you talk about above from? I’m curious how that as the right ratio was reached, and why you’d keep fat so low, carbs so high. My take is that it’d be too low in fats in the long-run, though might have benefit in the short-term. Of course, not all fats are created equal…

“Macro” is short for “macronutrient ratios” and in bodybuilding it means one of three nutritional pigeonholes: protein, carbohydrate and fat.

The advise is 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fats. The reason fats seem so low, is that per gram fat has a lot more calories in it. Protein and carbs have 4 calories per gram and fat has 9 calories per gram. Also, keep in mind that all of the carbs in this experiment are coming from ‘clean’ foods – a single cup serving of pasta has >40g of carbs in. It wouldn’t take much of a ‘typical’ diet for carbs to consume way more than 40% of daily intake.

I am certainly no expert here, I’ve left it up to me Clean Eating Challenge coach Hayley to set my macros – they have been calculated based off (I think..) my body weight, age, current body fat percentage and the goals I have discussed with her. In my case, they have been tweaked slightly away from fat loss and more towards performance.